Chimney Fire Safety Week: 1,665 Fires, Fewer Sweeps

Chimney Fire Safety Week landed this week, which means the trade has published its annual look at what people are actually burning and how often they are having the flue cleaned. The numbers cut both ways: fires are down sharply, but the maintenance habit that keeps them down is weakening. Here is what changed in the last fortnight, and what it means before you light the first fire of the season.

Chimney fires fell 18% in England, but the risk window is still January to March

Chimney Fire Safety Week runs 7 to 13 September 2026, led by HETAS with the government’s Fire Kills campaign and fire and rescue services. The timing is deliberate: it is the last quiet fortnight before most stoves get lit.

The figures behind it are better than they have been. England recorded 1,665 chimney fires in 2025-26, about 0.98 per cent of all fires, and that is a fall of 18.34 per cent on 2024-25. The seasonal pattern has not moved though. Forty-two per cent of chimney fires happen between January and March, when stoves are being run hardest and longest, and when a flue that was swept in September has had four months of deposits laid down in it.

The practical read for a stove owner is that the fall in fires is a result of how people burn, not of luck. Dry fuel and a hot, properly established fire deposit far less creosote than a smouldering one on damp wood. If you are not measuring your fuel, what moisture should firewood be covers the 20 per cent rule and how to check it, and how to season firewood to under 20% moisture covers getting there. Slumbering a stove overnight is the other big contributor, and keeping a wood burner in overnight explains how to do it without choking the fire down to smoke. HETAS has the campaign details at HETAS.

One in five sweeps say owners are cleaning less often than five years ago

The more uncomfortable half of the week’s research is about behaviour. HETAS research released for the campaign found one in five sweeping professionals say stove owners are having chimneys swept less often than they were five years ago, and 37.5 per cent say roughly one in every ten properties they visit has never had a chimney sweep at all. Asked why, 44 per cent pointed at cost-of-living pressure.

The same research turned up what is going into stoves, and it is not all firewood: nappies, Christmas trees and cardboard were all named. Christmas trees are the one worth flagging, because a green conifer is both wet and resinous, which is the fastest route to a creosote-lined flue there is. Cardboard flies up the chimney lit and lands on the roof. Neither is a marginal habit if the flue has not been swept.

The arithmetic here is straightforward. A sweep is a low double-figure to low three-figure cost once or twice a year depending on what you burn. Skipping it to save that while burning less predictable fuel puts the more expensive outcome on the table. If the reason you are looking at cheaper fuel is cost, the honest comparison is per useful kilowatt hour rather than per net, which is what kiln-dried logs vs briquettes sets out, and best wood to burn explains why species matters less than dryness. The research was reported by Installer Online.

Northern Ireland opens a clean air consultation that names solid fuel

On 1 September the Northern Ireland environment minister Andrew Muir launched an eight-week consultation on a draft Clean Air Strategy for Northern Ireland to 2032. It sets out five strategic objectives and a programme of actions covering monitoring, awareness campaigns, transport planning and tighter fuel and appliance standards. It closes on 27 October 2026.

“The air we breathe is vital to our health and that of our environment. There is no ‘safe’ level of air pollution,” Muir said, framing the strategy as a public health measure.

Nothing in this changes what you can burn today, in Northern Ireland or anywhere else. It is a consultation on a draft, and the fuel and appliance standards line is the part stove owners should read rather than the headline. Northern Ireland has a much higher share of solid fuel heating than the rest of the UK, so the response it gets will shape how much of this ends up as regulation. If you want to know what the current fuel rules actually oblige a seller to do, Ready to Burn explains what the logo certifies and, more usefully, what it does not. The consultation is at DAERA.